654 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 199. 



freedom of its movements suggests that it has a 

 ■will of its own ? This seems borne out by the 

 following story : A little girl of five once 

 stopped trundling her hoop and said to her 

 mother she thought that her hoop must be alive, 

 because ' it is so sensible ; it goes where I want 

 it to.' Perhaps the same may be said of other 

 toys, as the kite and the sailing boat." To the 

 writer it seems that the interest lies mainly in 

 the great wealth of motor adjustments which 

 this game occasions, together with the delight 

 of accomplishing a difficult task ; and if the 

 child has any conception of will in the object 

 it at least never rises up into explicit conscious- 

 ness, even though he employ such terms as 

 ' sensible ' in describing its activities. This 

 difference of opinion emphasizes the necessity 

 of employing more exact methods in discover- 

 ing the motive of much of the evolving mental 

 life of the child. 



All students of child-development would feel 

 grateful to Mr. Sully if he had endeavored to 

 find some unifying principle governing the be- 

 havior of the child mind at different stages in 

 its progress toward maturity. It may be that 

 there is no such unity of cause underlying the 

 psychical activities of children, but if there is 

 we are sorely in need of it to furnish a guide 

 for the elaboration of an educational scheme. 

 Our gravest affliction now seems to be that our 

 teaching is based upon the doctrine that there 

 is great and essential diversity in mental action, 

 and this leads us in teaching to feel that we 

 must have manifold methods required by the 

 different operations of the mind and various 

 branches of study to train different faculties. 

 It appears very likely that there is more homo- 

 geneity in the mental activities of the child 

 than we have been wont to think, and it would 

 be of incalculable benefit to all who train chil- 

 dren if they could see the underlying principles 

 of psychical ontogenesis. It would save them 

 from that distraction which seems everywhere 

 apparent in those who have been studying psy- 

 chology in the old way and learning about the 

 manifold operations which seem to be more or 

 less unrelated to one another. Mr. Sully's book 

 leaves one with the feeling of disperseness ; one 

 is a little confused by the heterogeneity of 

 things — the want of any unity of principle. 



And this feeling lends emphasis to a qustion 

 which of itself would keep popping into the 

 mind of the reader. Are the peculiar sayings 

 and performances of children set down in the 

 book due to minds little stocked with knowl- 

 edge reacting upon a complex environment, or 

 are the children living over again in some 

 measure the ancestral record ? The author 

 does not attempt an answer ; and possibly it is 

 well that he does not here, for he might fail of 

 his purpose of enlisting the interest of the lay 

 reader. But it is hoped that he will address 

 himself some time to these problems, for his 

 psychological training should make his discus- 

 sion of them of value to all students of the 

 evolution of mind in the individual. 



Mr. Taylor, in his The Study of the Child,* 

 has produced a very different sort of book from 

 Mr. Sully's. It is evident that he had a dif- 

 ferent purpose in mind — namely, to instruct 

 young people regarding the proper methods of 

 dealing with children as indicated by the re- 

 sults of modern scientific research. He has an 

 eminently practical aim in view, and in esti- 

 mating the worth of his work this must be kept 

 constantly in mind. The scientific student 

 would be apt to complain considerably of the 

 method pursued unless he held before himself 

 all the time its purpose, which is not to advance 

 a science but to apply it in the most concrete 

 way possible. It seems from the tone of the 

 writing that the contents of the book were 

 originally given as lectures to Mr. Taylor's stu- 

 dents in the Normal School at Emporia, Kansas, 

 and one is impressed that they must have been 

 of interest and value to these teachers who have 

 probably come to this subject with little previous 

 acquaintance, and who have immediate prac- 

 tical problems in the school-room to solve. 



In the main Mr. Taylor writes clearly and in- 

 telligibly for the readers he has in mind, which 

 is not a simple task by any means ; and he 

 makes his discussion concrete by producing an 

 abundance of apt illustrations which have fallen 

 within his own experience. But the writer 

 wonders why he felt it necessary to cling so 

 closely to the terminology and methods of 

 classification of the older psychology. He 

 *Taylor : 'The Study of the Child.' New York, D. 

 Appleton & Co. 



